The futility of environmentalism
March 1st, 2010Stuart Staniford at Early Warning mines the data contained in Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (a U.S. government report we covered here) and concludes that all the work environmentalists have done to protect species and habitats is doomed to be in vain:
All the work that’s been done over the past century to preserve some wild ecosystems in national parks etc, is going to be mostly subverted. The park may still be there, but what grows in it will, in most cases, be nothing like the thing that we were originally trying to save.
As the impacts of global warming manifest themselves over the coming century, warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will result in just about every landscape in the country changing radically.
Staniford’s piece exposes the flaw in the approach environmentalists took in the 70s, the approach (taken by Oregon’s statewide planning Goal 5 , for example): identify a “significant” resource, draw a line around it, and protect it from conflicting uses. Protecting a living resource requires much more than drawing a line around it. Rather, you have to maintain the health of the ecosystem within which it is embedded.
Within a global climate system wildly disrupted by human greenhouse gas emissions, how could we possibly expect that more local ecosystems could remain unaffected?